IMPRESSIONS OF EASTER 2014

It’s Easter Monday, a public holiday in Australia. And my thoughts today are probably getting a bit away from the Audacity theme. Easter 2014 has been a mixed bag.

The media always gives some time to reporting the Christian emphasis of Easter, especially Good Friday and Easter Sunday. But, if you’re a church that wants more than a token exposure, it’s a good idea to preach a sermon about something that’s currently high on the agenda of mainstream Australia. One Queensland Church focused on the problem of domestic violence. Others focus on ongoing problems of poverty or bullying.

The Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne ran their most successful Good Friday appeal ever this year, raising almost seventeen million dollars. Would such an appeal work as well on any other day? Who knows? It may be that sacrificially giving to those who are suffering is a subtle outworking of the Christian heritage that we have as a nation.

There have also been suggestions that next year the AFL will abandon it’s long-standing policy of refusing to stage football matches on Good Friday. I think there’s a general willingness to respect the day but it seems inevitable that commercial interests will encroach still further into Australian spirituality. We have become an extremely secular nation that gives the occasional nod to Christianity but then gets on with the “real” purpose of life – the pursuit of happiness through financial gain.

Perhaps, in the end, the ultimate audacity of a godless society is not to rail against Christian culture and ritual but to marginalise it, to divert attention away from it, and to condescend to it like the party hostess who finds an unwanted acquaintance and quips: “Oh, are you still here?”

Yes, Christians are still here. And we are an important part of this nation. We will continue to testify to the death and resurrection of Christ because that is the only real hope for life that anyone can possess.